One second, I’m bathed in brilliant orange light, like I’ve just been plunged inside the sun. Then, geometric spirals of tunnelling technicolour pull me towards a some all-consuming point in the unreachable distance, before the whole thing folds in on itself, and I’m being flung back towards some other realm. It’s intense, and what’s most incredible is that it’s all happening behind my closed eyelids. It takes real power of thought to remind myself that, no, I’m not traversing the astral plane — I’m actually sitting inside an old market in Woolwich.
You’d struggle to believe this kind of mind-melting is exactly what Theresa May had envisaged when the former prime minister announced plans back in 2018 for the Festival of Great Britain and Northern Ireland — dubbed by some a Festival of Brexit — but here we are. That cumbersome name has been dropped, first in favour of the faintly W1A-ish Festival 2022, before settling on something rather more ambiguous: Unboxed.
